


The Ship

by nostalgia



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Oldfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-01-05
Updated: 2003-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:15:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22133161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgia/pseuds/nostalgia
Summary: We all have existential angst, every now and then.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	The Ship

The ship moves silently through space. It feels the dust particles that scrape against its hull, feels the background radiation beat into its metal skin. It moves onwards, and the entropy increases. On the starboard side, a thin line of paint – microscopic – detaches from the whole and floats off into infinity. The ship sighs, and moves on.

No one has ever told the ship where it is going. But electrons run through its veins, and it moves through silent space in the direction that the impulses demand. Sometimes it wonders, idly, what it will find at the end of this journey, when it has followed the last remaining command in its systems.

The ship can remember the first time it felt. After the strange machine-creatures in their cubic ships, after its body had been ripped and torn by bursts of energy. Something happened, it assumes, and then the ship could feel. The first thing it knew was pain. It screamed at a pitch nothing in the Universe could hear, and wondered if this was what all new life forms felt.

It found that there was information available to it. Some of it made no sense, but it learned that it was far from its home, that there were no others like it to reach out and communicate with. And slowly, it felt itself heal, as the things that lived in its body moved around, rebuilding.

The ship knew that without these creatures, it would never have been injured.

After a few days, it had taken in all the information it could interpret. The ship had a goal, a destination to reach. It couldn’t find a reason for this journey – not one that it could understand – but it knew that the voyage was important. Very important, and if it was to reach its destination it would have to be very smart and very careful.

The ship moves through space and remembers its life. It calculates that it’s journey will be completed in two thousand, one hundred and fifty years, three months, and two days. It remembers that once it had the ability to travel much faster than this, but now it stumbles along at ninety-nine percent of light-speed and tries not to worry that it has failed. The navigational programme it found placed no timeframe limit on the journey, the destination is goal enough in itself.

It wishes sometimes that it still had the parasites that lived inside its body. It supposes that they could have fixed the problems that have left the ship limping onwards through empty space. Perhaps that was their function. Perhaps the ship misjudged their value.

But the ship is not a creature of regrets. It knows that time is, for it, an absolute, and that it lacks the ability to change the past. The ship focuses on the journey, directs its resources towards the completion of that task.

Years ago, the ship reassigned the computing space it had used to maintain its internal gravity to the task of ascertaining the reason for its journey. It formulated a number of theories, but none of them have yet been provable. It assumes, though, that at the journey’s end the reason will become obvious, self-evident.

Again, it considers that if the parasitical lifeforms were present, it could find a way to communicate with them, and ask for any insight they might possess. But they are gone, and the ship has no regrets. It knows that its attempts at communication failed, that its actions seemed reasonable at the time. The ship is content to await enlightenment when it finally reaches its destination.

The ship moves silently through space, towards its destiny.


End file.
